Nurse Nina Pham — once the upbeat face of the Dallas hospital that confronted the country’s first Ebola case — sued the hospital’s parent company Monday, alleging that it had failed to protect her before and after she was diagnosed...

Methodist Hospitals President and CEO Ray Grady has been on the job only one week, but he spent much of it listening — to doctors, staff, patients, and their families.
"I felt like that was the right thing to do in order to begin to think about...

Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano speaks fondly of the days when his dad was a primary care doctor in independent practice, running his patients' lab tests and performing mammograms in his office to make sure they got done.
"I think that era is going to...

Three years ago, Dr. Wayne Benjamin — then 67 years old — was considering retirement. He was worn out, frustrated with the daily grind of his family medicine practice and the increasing pressure to see "more and more patients in shorter and...

WASHINGTON Nearly half the states use higher copayments to dissuade Medicaid recipients from unnecessary visits to emergency rooms, where care is more costly.
These states require patients to make the payments, which are as high as $30 per visit in Oklahoma, when it is later determined that they did not experience a true medical emergency.
But at least one multistate study has found that charging higher copayments does not reduce emergency department (ED) use by Medicaid recipients. One reason might...

A Gothic hip-hop artist who called herself "the Michelangelo of buttocks injections" testified at her murder trial on Thursday that she got into body sculpting 20 years ago to help transgender friends and has since performed thousands of procedures.
Padge-Victoria Windslowe, who also rapped under the name Black Madam, is charged in the death of a college student she injected with low-grade silicone at a Philadelphia airport motel in 2011.
Windslowe said she thought the 20-year-old London break-dancer...

Health-care officials put an Orange County anesthesiologist on probation this month after allegations that talking on his cellphone distracted him from tending to a patient who died after dental implant surgery in Newport Beach.
According to a complaint by the Medical Board of California, Dr. Barry Friedberg was slow to react or call 911 when a 57-year-old patient's heart stopped while she was under general anesthesia at the Smile Implant Center in 2010.
Friedberg had administered doses of the...

Imagine this basic scenario: You are out of milk. You could go to your local convenience store and purchase a gallon for $3. But instead, you drive 25 miles to buy the identical gallon of milk for $5 at a large chain grocery store.
If this sounds absurd, that's because it is. However, it's analogous to current health care payment policies that allow significantly higher reimbursements for health care services provided in certain settings, when identical, more convenient and less expensive care in...

NEW BRITAIN – When the Hospital for Special Care opened its autism center three years ago in the former Mary Immaculate Academy on Corbin Avenue, the founders instinctively involved the children's doctors, schools, and families in the treatment, and never forgot the children's social and recreational needs.
There is jargon for this --- "patient-centered treatment," "integrated care" – and the center's staff was quietly making a mark nationally with the connective tissue it had built around...

The Holy Cross Medical Group is expanding a new model of primary medical care that tracks patients to make sure they go to their appointments and take their medication.
The program has grown from one location to five in Broward, thanks to a grant from the Broward Regional Health Planning Council.
It should be in all of the medical group's 22 offices by next year, said Sandy Herbert, director of operations for the Holy Cross Medical Group, which includes 180 physicians and their staffs.
"It really...